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City Housing Projects Call For Environmental Help
Peter Moskowitz and
On a recent Saturday, Ashley Paniagua walked down a brick pathway that snaked between the towering Manhattanville Houses in Harlem, and headed toward a small garden she had helped plant months earlier. But the gates to the gardens were locked — the government worker who opened them every morning had yet to do so.
“It’s a lot of politics,” Ms. Paniagua, 26, said. “You’ve got to go through so many people, just to get something simple done.”
Five years ago, the New York City Housing Authority, the city agency that provides subsidized apartments to over 400,000 low-income New Yorkers, decided to “go green.” It set up a Web site devoted to environmental sustainability, encouraged residents to create green committees in their developments and planned new recycling programs.
But many residents say the agency has failed to follow through. The agency, they say, has not been supportive of residents’ efforts and has in some circumstances stood in their way.
“For little things, like paper to print fliers, most of that comes from us,” Ms. Paniagua said. “They’re pushing for greening, but I don’t see the backup. We’re doing most of the work on our own.”
In 2009, when Ms. Paniagua decided to plant gardens on the lawns at the Manhattanville Houses, she said, she had no idea that the process of getting permits and financing would take almost three years. She and others working with her ended up turning to a nonprofit group, the Citizens Committee for New York City, for the $3,000 they needed for gardening supplies.
Ms. Paniagua is not alone in complaining about the state of sustainability in public housing developments. Other residents in Harlem and the Bronx say the agency has discouraged their efforts to increase recycling.
The city’s recycling law, adopted in 1989, requires all residents and businesses to recycle, though New York City has a recycling rate of 15 percent of its waste. Trying to measure the public housing agency’s record on recycling is hard because its data collection is inconsistent. In some cases, recyclables are listed by the number of items collected, while in other cases by the number of bags of recyclables collected. But more than half of the 334 public housing projects in the city have no recycling bins, according to agency documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request. That may help explain why the recycling rate is so low in neighborhoods with a large number of public housing projects — in the South Bronx, home to 14 projects, the rate is just under 5 percent.
Margarita López, a New York City Housing Authority commissioner who leads the agency’s environmental initiatives, said the collection rate was low because in most projects it was easier to throw recyclables in the regular trash.
The agency “has chutes in every floor where people put their garbage through that chute, and they do not separate the recycling material,” Ms. López said. “We have no choice but to encourage people to bring the recycling down to the first floor of buildings. We have no choice but to tell people that this is something you must do for the quality of life and for themselves.”
But according to residents in several developments, the agency could do more to encourage recycling.
Brigitte Vicenty, a tenant of the Mott Haven Houses in the South Bronx, tried to develop a recycling plan in late 2011, after realizing that no recyclables were being collected at the project.
She drafted a plan for residents to go door-to-door handing out recycling bags to every resident.
But the agency never allowed the program to get off the ground, Ms. López said, because having people knock on strangers’ doors was a security concern. When Ms. Vicenty suggested that residents leave their recycling in the hallway to be collected, Ms. López told her that it would be a fire safety violation.
Ms. Vicenty’s idea was based on a program at the General Grant Houses in Harlem, which residents there began in 2007. The concept was the same: educate the residents on how to handle their waste and hand out bags. Recycling collection increased drastically when the Harlem program was put in place, according to Gloria Allen, a resident who helped start the campaign. The agency has allowed the program there to continue.
Eric Goldstein, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the city’s recycling law requires that landlords educate their residents on recycling and provide sufficient storage space to put recyclables.
The housing authority, he said, “is violating the cornerstone requirement of the recycling law.”
“You can’t make recycling work without setting aside space,” he added. “Residents have to know how and where to recycle."
Agency officials say they are doing as much as they can, given the challenges they face, including an increasingly dilapidated and outdated housing stock and a precarious financial situation. The agency needs about $25 billion just to maintain its buildings over the next 15 years, which does not include weatherizing apartments, planting gardens or green roofs or adding recycling areas to every floor.
Nova Strachan, who lives in the Union Avenue Consolidation houses in the Bronx, said that when the agency set up its Web site on environmental sustainability, it installed 178,000 energy-efficient light bulbs throughout the city. Ms. Strachan said she had hoped the agency was beginning to tackle the backlog of repairs and sustainability at the same time. Now, she said, her enthusiasm has waned.
“The whole green thing feels like it was a buzzword,” she said. “It feels like it’s fading out.”
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